Early Childhood (and K-12)
Professional Development
Book Your Training Now!
The Down To Earth Dad® professional development trainings are for early childhood and K-12 program and school teams and their community partners.
Choose from father engagement, staff stress-reduction, and story-sharing training themes (see below; mix and match as needed) and deliver professional development that builds stronger bonds, optimizes positive outcomes for children, families, and teams—and fuels program, school, and community and state initiatives.
Entertaining and interactive, these trainings create meaningful connection while supporting cognitive, social, and emotional development across programs, schools, and communities.
Chances are VERY good your team will say afterward this was the most FUN training they ever attended!
These high-quality professional development trainings are offered year-round as on-site or virtual sessions and can be customized for conference breakouts and community-partner outreach events. They create lasting, positive impact for both new and experienced teams and support enduring benefits for the children and families they serve.
DAD-ENGAGEMENT TRAINING:
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- Learn *exactly* how to talk to men so they’ll listen.
- Learn how to listen to men so they’ll talk (click link at left).
- Celebrate maternal and paternal parenting styles
- Learn tried, tested, and perfected techniques to get (and keep) men optimally engaged.
- Be motivated and entertained by the trainer, by cool audio-visuals, and by each other!
- Learn how to motivate your dads’ employers to support father engagement.
- Share individual and small-group visions for enhanced father engagement, and set goals for positive outcomes all year long.
- Bond closer as a team.
- Have fun!
Do you have Home Visitors or other specialty educators on your team? This training is a game-changer for them! From strengthening father engagement at intake to empowering dad engagement in the home, this training delivers.
STAFF STRESS-REDUCTION TRAINING:
The Office of Head Start (OHS) published a memorandum supporting staff wellness, well-being, and mental health for all staff in the Head Start workforce. This training fits the bill par excellence!
Staff wellness & well-being is VITAL to child well-being, so it’s CRUCIAL to optimize your team’s interactions with children and families by reducing their stress.
This training helps Head Start and Early Head Start (EHS) teams strengthen emotional resilience and provide responsive care to parents and families—by first building a strong foundation of mutual support among themselves!
The Stress Reduction event is an interactive and entertaining
journey exploring seven threads, or topics, rolled out consecutively and interlocking and with small-and-all-group activities along the way.
Comical and meaningful audio-visuals. Participatory by nature, but minimum participation is OK. Join in or kick back!
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- Eliminating—Permanently—the Stressors You Can
- Harnessing Remaining Stressors to Your ADVANTAGE!
- Acknowledging Stressors Across Job Titles & at Home
- Supporting Each Other.
- Techniques to Promote Staff Well-Being and Ease Stress
- Tools for Enhancing Team Communication and Morale
- Ideas to Incorporate into Your Program’s Wellness Plan
- Maintaining Positive, Healthy Workplaces for Everyone
- Practical Ways to Ease Daily Personal and Staff Stress
- Useful Tools that Strengthen Individual and Team Spirit
- Tactics for Peer Connection and Team Resilience
- Ready-to-Roll Activities for Your Wellness Plan
- Lasting Strategies for Maintaining a Positive Work Culture
- Fun, Laughter, and Great Takeaways!
- Lastly: A Colorful Make-And-Take Project for All Families!
Once you book, tell your team they’re in for a good time! They’ll laugh and have fun! The focus is stress reduction, but there’s magic in the camaraderie and shared catharsis. Plenty of “aha” moments and good feeling among participants. Energizing, and memorable!
This FUN Staff PD is aligned with the Head Start Act on effective training for workforce development, HSPPS §1302.93 and §1302.101 on staff wellness and management systems.
NOTE: You can mix-and-match The Down To Earth Dad training
topics to create a custom experience for your team–some stress
reduction, father engagement, and story-sharing for ECE!
STORY-SHARING FOR EDUCATORS:
Instead of relying solely on manufactured stories for early-literacy enhancement, early childhood and school-age program/school educators can weave in their own personal narratives to boost literacy—and share individual, family, and community history/heritage/culture along the way!
Patrick will show your team (and community partners, if invited) *exactly* how to leverage the power of personal storytelling to enliven educator-parent interactions around literacy (and community stories for history and fun) and to bolster cognitive, social, and emotional development.
Book a Story-Sharing for Educator Teams training to empower your team and turbo-charge parent engagement, strengthen families, enhance early literacy, build resilience, deepen social connection, boost social-emotional competence, and reduce child stress—sparking change that ripples across your program and community. True story!
Storytelling Benefits Reach Beyond Early Childhood. Research suggests that school-age children and older who know how to story share — which they can learn from their parents and other caring adults in their community— are more likely to be resilient adolescents able to successfully navigate stressors!
There are many topics available for your Staff PD Training with Patrick Mitchell. Let’s customize what works best for your team.
Remember, you can host a Family Storytelling Night® the evening prior to your professional development training—it’s a great one-two punch of value and FUN! (In-Kind is sometimes available for the second event.)
See some of Patrick’s recent and upcoming events.
Or, BOOK a 15-Minute FREE CALL to…
… Ask Patrick Anything!